What are you interested in?

Identifying which sectors and pressures are impacting which ecological components starts with identifying which sectors are present in your assessment area. The ODEMM Linkage Framework can then be used to identify all of the links between sectors, pressures, ecological components and MSFD GES Descriptors. The Linkage Framework gives a holistic overview of all the potential interactions in the system. To develop this further, the Pressure Assessment can then be used to begin to weight the impact of the sectors and pressures which occur. The Pressure Assessment illustrates a broad picture of all the pressures that occur together in a system. It may also be useful to further rank these pressures in some way to prioritise management. The Risk Assessment quantifies the Pressure Assessment results and can give a relative risk value of pressures in the system and which sectors contribute these.

You may be most interested in focussing management on the state of some ecological components which, for example, are important for policy objectives. The Pressure Assessment uses criteria for the assessment which considers the relative sensitivity of ecological components to specific sectors, activities and pressures and identifies the sectors which pose the greatest threat. The Risk Assessment can then be used to identify which ecological components are most at risk.

The risk of failing to meet environmental policy objectives, such as those of the MSFD, can assessed using two approaches with ODEMM. A rapid assessment can be carried out using the Assessing the State of Good Environmental Status. This allows current information and expert judgement to be used to make an assessment of each of the MSFD GES Descriptors.

A second approach is the Risk Assessment. This allows you identify the ecological components most at risk of failing to achieve GES.

Management options can be ranked according to how much risk they reduce for ecological components using the Integrated Management Strategy Evaluation (iMSE) tool. This tool can both help you to create management options in a structured way and assess their performance in terms of ecological effectiveness.

The approaches developed in ODEMM for assessing costs and benefits allow a structured way of identifying which costs and benefits to consider. The Linkage Framework and Ecosystem Services Typology allow you to identify which ecosystem services are relevant for your system to enable you to carry out a full assessment of the benefits. The Typology of Costssimilarly allows you to consider all of the relevant costs in the system.